


brave vessel

by klickitats



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, Post-In Your Heart Shall Burn, Snow Ruins Everything, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 15:49:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6246043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the destruction of Haven, the Inquisition weathers a blizzard only to come apart at the seams. The Herald is missing, Josephine starts having visions, and Cassandra and Vivienne, separated from the others by the avalanche, must survive a journey through the Frostbacks alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lafillechanceuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lafillechanceuse/gifts).



> A fill for an incredible prompt from lafillechanceuse about Vivienne and Josephine struggling with the aftermath of Haven on the long journey to Skyhold, with accompanying themes of faith. I hope it does your vision justice.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The avalanche destroys Haven, and Vivienne and Cassandra find themselves on their own.

Miranda: _O, I have suffered_

_With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,_

_Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her,_

_Dash’d all to pieces. O, the cry did knock_

_Against my very heart. Poor souls…_

_Had I been any god of power, I would_

_Have sunk the sea within the earth._

( _The Tempest,_ 1:2)

* * *

 

Cassandra wakes, mouth full of snow. She chokes on it, rolling and tossing to free herself of the pounds and pounds of white ice holding her steady beneath the ground. The unyielding palm of a frozen sea. She will die here, if she does not move.

She grapples towards the surface—is it a surface? No sun. The snow finds its way inside her nose, her ears, and even her most dedicated flailing will not loosen its grip.

The edges of her vision go grey enough to mean trouble when her hand bursts through the top, grappling nothing, pawing through snow for purchase. Cassandra’s best moments don’t require much thought, only the getting out of the way of her own body—soon enough her head and shoulders rise above the surface, sputtering.

Face to face, of course, with the shaggy snow-bear staring directly into her eyes. Thick mucus drips from its snout, freezing before it plops onto the ground. The coat sparkles with ice crystals, its hide thin and mangy. The bear growls.

It is hungry. The cold screech of the wind blinds her instantly.

When she opens them against the frost, she witnesses a most elegant stalagmite blossom out of the snow straight through the tender flesh of the bear’s neck. It dies. Neatly impaled. Immediately frozen.

Madame Vivienne stands up to her ankles in the snow, without staff or spirit blade, but still donning her pointed and useless _hennin_. The most Orlesian of miracles.

“My lady,” she says, and the bite of her voice is welcome heat, even as Cassandra continues scrambling out of her snowy prison. “How kind of you to join me.”

~~~

Vivienne attempts to send up a signal, a flare high and powerful enough to not be caught by the rushing wind. It doesn’t work.

“Save it,” Cassandra grits from between her teeth. She takes a moment to breathe before the next glass-sharp pass of wind around the mountain, cutting through each inch of armor and cloth to go straight for the heart.

Vivienne tilts her head up to the cloudy sky. “I don’t want them to think we’re dead,” she calls back, and not even the wind can remove the mildness of her tone.

“It doesn’t matter.” Cassandra leans into a boulder, hand outstretched. “They’ve got better things to worry about. Hurry up.”

She hesitates, but eventually pulls back into the shadow of the stone. The wind picks up, sending snowdrifts floating away with the carelessness of tossed handkerchiefs.

“I want them to worry about keeping themselves alive.” Cassandra pulls Vivienne as tight as she can into the place between boulder and mountain. “Not about us.”

“How selfless,” Vivienne remarks. “Why don’t—“

Her words end as the next blast stings across the mountain face, sending ice shards skittering, snow flying, and worst of all, the bite of the blasted wind. Cassandra turns her face away; Vivienne’s gloved hands press against her face to protect herself.

They’ve moved ten meters in an hour and the sun is long set; they will easily freeze and die here. Vivienne is not made for hard mountain climbing even if they were properly outfitted. It’s no slight against her, though Cassandra has never seen her in action, only heard Blackwall regale the tavern with tales of Madame de Fer and her trek through the muck of the Fallow Mire.

(Cassandra blocks out the sound of the tavern ninety-eight percent of the time. She doesn’t find time for the gossip, the swill-songs, and the ring of her sword against the practice dummy is the only music she particularly cares for.

But some wisp of his story caught her ear as she passed once, and she found herself leaning against the window, listening. Madame de Fer, who kept to herself in the Chantry, reading and appearing when only when Lavellan summoned her for an opinion. Kept busy by the running of her own projects, as well as the Inquisition. A mystery to Cassandra. They’d only spoken once, at introductions. Josephine dealt with her most. She and Leliana immediately found themselves at complete political odds, and the moment Lavellan freed the mages completely, the schism was settled permanently.

Blackwall had been talking about how Vivienne could fadewalk—a magical trick where mages touched the Fade and streamed across the mortal plane like lightning or wind, so quick only a trail of ice was left in their wake. How she flew across an entire bog to draw her sword on a despair demon, a wily creature too quick to be bound by Lavellan’s knives or Sera’s arrows.

_Walked on water. Aye, like a song. Like fucking poetry_ , he’d said with a sigh, and Cassandra had exhaled, stupidly. Looked down, found her arms crossed, a lazy hand on her sword.

She’d turned immediately back to her yard and hacked at the dummy till the practice blade chipped.)

This wind is particularly long—with each gust it grows in strength, and less time in between them to move and breathe. When Vivienne pulls away little trickles of tears gather at the corner of her eyes from the sting. They freeze on her cheeks. Cassandra assumes she looks much the same.

“Can you still cast?” she asks, turning to survey the path. There’s nothing but mountain, edge, and snow.

Vivienne nods.

“We don’t find shelter, we die,” Cassandra says, plainly as she can. “Climb on.”

Somehow, even at the edge of death, this proves a surprise. Vivienne blinks. Cassandra smacks the mountain wall. “On my back,” she snaps. “I carry us both. Next wind, do something.”

Vivienne’s eyes narrow and she pulls back, unwilling to to be ordered. Cassandra spits, catching her wrists. “I’m not going to leave you here.” She releases her, turns, hears the wind picking up from down the mountain. If she can’t bear that, she’ll find another way.

But gloved fingers—long and deft—touch her shoulders. Without a word, Cassandra kneels down just low enough to let Vivienne clamor up, arms wrapped around her neck. Cassandra slides her hands underneath her legs, holding her tightly. She pauses—waits for the nod of Vivienne’s head in her peripherals, and then shoves off into the snow.

She stops thinking. Vivienne doesn’t weigh much. The snow is high, the wind begins to wail. She doesn’t think about how difficult it is, how much her hands hurt, how she can’t feel anything below her waist.

Cassandra hears the wind before its sharpness is upon them; she grips Vivienne tighter to her, knowing her fingers will bruise, and puts her head down to push.

Vivienne waits till the exact moment, that half-a-breath before the wind seeks to flay the flesh from their raw bones, to raise her hands and cast a barrier. An out-of-place tinkling of song, drops of musical quicksilver. The sound of lightning weaving through snowflakes, humming with a soft glow.

It’s tinged with violet-silver, glass blown from a god’s lungs. Just clear enough for Cassandra to see through.

Her legs scream, but never stop. They lose time in the storm. Every minute rips at them. Vivienne casts, every gust, without fail, without the slightest hesitation. Until her joints are frozen into place from holding Cassandra, until her forehead drops to Cassandra’s shoulder, until she can only flick her wrist to raise her spell.

~~~

They find cover.

An opening between some cracked rocks—the entrance to a cavern, or a bear’s den, probably crawling with cave spiders.

Vivienne is too cold to unwind herself from Cassandra, so she grits her teeth and climbs up, slipping on the ice-covered rock. She topples inside head first, and they land with a crash on stone cave floor.

All Cassandra knows, before the world goes black and hazy, is they are somewhere in the Frostbacks, without her sword and shield, far from the Inquisition, without food or water.

The sound of Vivienne’s breath. The rush and retreat of warmth against her ear. Darkness.

Cassandra’s dreams flutter and crack, meaningless shape and color. They never make sense, and never taste like reality or the Fade should. No whimsy, no beauty, and no horror. Cluttered and useless as dry lightning. She’s been hit too hard on the head, and too many times. Whatever’s in there to connect her spirit to the Fade is in dire need of repair.

Twinges of violet light, lined with silver. A new color for the dream. It seems familiar. Empty flashes, empty shadows. Her eyelids weigh too much to open, which sparks deep and familiar resentment. An ugly red pain in her head.

_Up_ , she tells herself, in a voice she was born with—a voice like a branch cracking under her boot, the snap of a flail. A voice to separate a new recruit from her very soul. _Up. Now._

And she opens her eyes.

Vivienne stands at the entrance to the cave, a long, white wand in her hand. It points like a quill pen, wrought from feather-thin ice and honed to a precise point. She taps her chin, lost in thoughtfulness, before raising her hand and writing glyphs in strange, snow-pale calligraphy. The magic sings a low, tuneless tone with the touch of the point to the stone: she adds to an already winding vine that circles the entrance to the cave.

“I always considered you very prompt, Lady Cassandra.” The voice rings out at a pleasant volume as Cassandra lurches herself up into a sitting position. “Yet, this is the second time you’ve been late to wake.”

It’s teasing, just Vivienne’s peculiar way of making conversation, but Cassandra’s head throbs. She has only been out a couple of hours. “Seeker will do, Madame,” she corrects. “And you should have woken me.”

“If you needed rest, you needed rest.” Her tone changes quickly to matter-of-factness. She snaps her fingers, and the wand in her fingers disappears. Outside, the wind howls, and the storm rages still.

She takes stock: no sword, no shield, not even her old boot knife, carried steadily at her ankle since she joined the Seekers, or the small blades carried at either wrist. Everything was flung from her. It appears Vivienne holds little else. No staff. Apparently the Maker felt only the hennin was worth saving.

Her eyes linger at the dim firelight. Vivienne’s lit fire, a strange red-purple flame, in the center of the cave. It flickers steadily, the heat golden against her fingers.

Cassandra glares at it and peels off her wet gloves and boots.

“How much of your strength does this sap?” she demands. Their lack of preparation tenses her, anxiety winding each of her muscles.

“Very little,” Vivienne answers. Her voice turns, like a key buckling a lock. “I’m quite proficient at judging my own endurance.”

“You should save it,” Cassandra mutters, but Vivienne ignores her. Instead, she sweeps around, her silver skirts fluttering. The high collar nearly comes up to her chin. Her coat and hennin sit delicately upon a nearby boulder, just waiting.

She sits in front of Cassandra, perched on her knees, and makes a little motion. This close, she can see the delicate filigree of silver thread on her deep grey robes.

“Tilt your head down,” she says.

Cassandra immediately recoils—habit. She can hear a chorus of her past teachers, all of them rolling their eyes and sighing in unison. _Why do you always fight healers?_ “What’s wrong?”

Vivienne makes a twiddling motion with her fingers. “Your hair’s matted.” Before Cassandra can open her mouth to make a point of how little she cares, Vivienne’s eyebrow raises infinitesimally. “From blood, Seeker.” Her voice is dry. “The mountain left a mark.”

Her head throbs, almost on command, and Cassandra’s jaw clenches. But she leans her head forward, little by little, until Vivienne’s fingers smooth down her hair. Her fingertips press against a cut. Four fingers and her thumb, and the cut still extends. Cassandra is far beyond flinching now.

She feels those same fingertips flare, the unmistakable feeling of magic against her crown, and jerks away. A swift, burning heat before utter chill. Vivienne merely dusts off her hands. Too quick.

“You didn’t ask,” says Cassandra, stupidly.

“I know how to ration my mana,” Vivienne responds. “I am quite past lessons. Even from you.”

Her curiously even tone sets a spark in Cassandra. “Permissions,” she grits out.

Vivienne waves her hand. “After all your blood has left you,” she says, “perhaps your body will bleed pride.”

It’s a hair too dramatic for Cassandra to take. “Ask,” she says. “You know better.”

“Should I have asked before I killed that bear?” Vivienne adjusts a loose thread in her sleeve. There’s a ripped piece of cloth wrapped around her hand, on the soft hill of her thumb. Cassandra doesn’t know where it came from. “’Permit me, O Seeker, to act on your behalf to save your life?’”

Cassandra turns away to the fire. “Ask,” she says again. “Next time. Unless courtesy is too common for you.”

The silence is too long. “Very well,” Vivienne says, and stands. She goes back to the entrance of the cave, crosses her arms. She watches the snow flurry past the entrance. When the harsh cut of the wind tries to enter, the glyphs flare, singing their tuneless notes, and the wind is turned back, back, back.

~~~

“You forget,” Vivienne says, later, so mildly Cassandra may sweat actual pellets of steel, “how you wanted to weather out the avalanche, as though we were as tall and strong as giants.”

“So we just abandon the Herald?” Cassandra paces back and forth. The cave is too small for her liking. “It goes against everything.”

“Or we could have caught up with the Inquisition, and not been near-drowned in the inevitable.” Vivienne leans against the cave wall, her legs folded elegantly under her.

The conversation had begun innocently enough. The night is long, and both are too on edge to sleep. Vivienne, tilting her head through the veritable porthole of their shelter and inquiring, _have you any idea where we are?_ And Cassandra’s terse answer, the sarcasm of a caged cat: _The Frostbacks, Madame. Any other questions?_

It rolled downhill from there.

“This conversation is proving oddly reassuring,” Vivienne remarks. “Even the most practical of us is prone to delusions.”

“I don’t leave comrades behind on the field.” Cassandra clenches her jaw.

Vivienne closes her eyes and settles against the cave wall. Cassandra recognizes the position—a way for mages to regenerate mana, an exercise in concentration and focus. “Not even you are woman enough to turn back an avalanche.” The thin amusement rakes at her. “Despite what legends say.”

A long silence. Cassandra paces away to the entrance of the cave.

“What was inevitable?” she finally asks, unable to bear only the sounds of silence and the howling wind. The glyphs shiver when she comes near. Her breath puffs little white clouds against the stone.

“The Herald’s grand sacrifice.” Vivienne waves a hand, and a ball of light appears in her palms. “The enemy crushing us under a stone fist. Haven, obliterated.”

The dry emotionlessness of _Haven, obliterated_ makes Cassandra close her eyes. “That was never inevitable.”

“It was.” Vivienne is unperturbed. “I have said it since my arrival.” She opens an eye. “Come, Seeker. You’re a—well.” She stops herself, as though to pursue a correction.

Cassandra glances over her shoulder, a hard look that does not penetrate.

“You’re not a tactician,” Vivienne says. “Not a military woman. You work on your own, don’t you?”

It shouldn’t feel like a slight, but everything does, when Cassandra is this naked and this out of place. “What does that matter?” she bites out.

“Only that it would not occur to you,” Vivienne continues, “what a poor place Haven would be to defend. One only lies in the shadow of a mountain if they’re hiding and hoping not to be found.”

Cassandra’s fist clenches. “How was I not informed of your military prowess? I will berate Cullen, next I see him.” _If_ , reminds a voice, a voice Cassandra is not in the habit of listening to, not at all.

“ _Au contraire_.” Vivienne closes both of her eyes again, her hands moving into a new position. Cassandra is quickly learning Vivienne is the rare type of individual who finds conflict and debate a meditation. “I doubt a place on this mortal plane exists that you wouldn’t defend.”

The silence is strange. She eyes the sentence in her mind, the way one evaluates whether an opponent is a friend or an enemy. That is, until Vivienne opens her hands and says, “Had you a sword.”

The back of her neck flushes red with heat, and she sputters.

“You may believe my claim or no.” The tips of Vivienne’s fingers glow with barely-noticeable dimness in the flickering firelight. Cassandra has never witnessed a mage complete this practice while carrying on a conversation. The focus required—

She pulls her gaze away. She, at least, will not stare.

“Perhaps,” Cassandra mutters, finding ample fuel to continue the fight, if only to distract from those fingers, “it was lost.”

“Lost?” The eyebrow raise is just as elegant as the pose.

“In the deluge.” She turns to look out the cave entrance. The wind rises. “With all the claims you’ve made since joining the Inquisition, I imagine one or two do not make it to the proper ears.”

The silence is icy, now. Good. Cassandra glares out at the snow whipping across the air.

In the corner of her eye, the glow of Vivienne’s fingers never fades.

“What a surprise.” Her voice is calm and—earnest. The sigh inside it shakes its head wearily. A cold creeps up Cassandra’s spine. Vivienne does not wait for her response. “Of all of them, I never expected you to be a disappointment.”

Cassandra whirls about before she has command of herself. “Take my seat on the war council.” She makes no effort to blunt the hardness of her voice. “If you can predict the destruction of Haven, the arrival of a horde of corrupted templars fresh from the White Spire was next on your list of miracles.”

“It is not ostentatious,” Vivienne says, “to imagine our enemies would all find themselves friends after a time.” Her hands turn and press together. The light moves from her fingertips to ball and bloom between her palms, a candlelight inside a lantern. “And all the Inquisition, bound up in one corner of the world. Quite an opportunity.”

“Perfect.” Cassandra nearly spits the word onto the cave floor. “I understand your rush to leave Lavellan.”

Vivienne doesn’t answer, but the very air vibrates with question.

“A prophet never stays in place when she knows what’s coming,” says Cassandra, willing herself to unclench her fists. “Somebody’s skin must be saved.”

A long silence.

“Twice in one night.” Now Vivienne allows herself a sigh, and its bitter emptiness makes Cassandra clench her teeth. “The walk across the mountain to this frigid hole pales in comparison.”

The anger blisters. Instant and unforgiveable. “Of course,” mutters Cassandra. “You did so much of the walking.”

The weight of its unfairness nearly extinguishes the fire. It would, were Cassandra inclined to fantastic works. The disappointment in the cave takes up tangible space. The reaction of one impossible thing meeting another: the deadly, peaceful cold, and a rigid flame, hungry and open.

“This is a stupid argument,” Cassandra states, to no one but herself. “We should focus on how to get back to the others.”

Vivienne says nothing, gives nothing, bestows nothing. The light glimmers, undaunted.

They do not speak another word to each other.

~~~

The storm dissipates sometime before the sun rises behind a sea of grey clouds. The wind gusts and wails, but no longer cuts like a wide blade. The snow ceases. It’s quiet outside.

Vivienne pours water into Cassandra’s hands to drink—a simple trick of fire and ice together. In Vivienne’s fingers, the act is simple as exhaling.

She thanks her with a nod, and then climbs out of the cave entrance. The mountain is wide, white, and sparse. No sun to point them, but Cassandra’s sense of direction is sure. They set out east. There are no markers of the Inquisition’s survivors because of the new and heavy snow. Dispiriting, but surely a force of hundreds—Maker, let there be that many of them left—is not an impossible task.

The pace is less than desirable.

Cassandra pushes forward. Hardly the first mountain she’s walked, and the path is wide enough. The harder she goes, the less she must think about last night’s conversation in the cave, and the churning pit of her stomach. Only hunger. Not guilt. Vivienne falls behind, catches up, and falls behind again. She is no more built for scaling a mountainside than she was the night before, but Cassandra’s out of patience.

She looks over her shoulder once or twice to track her companion. Each time, her stomach twists. Cassandra’s constant failing. Her temper is only a sword until the remorse that follows severs blade from hilt. At no point does Vivienne demand an apology, because they both know words gathered for that purpose mean little. And at no point does Cassandra offer one.

The fact of the matter remains they must find the Inquisition or slowly die of exposure here in the mountains. And Cassandra will press forward through the snow until she dies or does so. Vivienne will keep pace or catch up. Cassandra imagines if their positions were reversed, she’d expect no less.

So they march hard, Vivienne usually a handful of meters behind, often more.

She only speaks once: Cassandra’s name, calm but barbed, a hook in her shoulder.

She instantly turns on her heel. Vivienne has fallen far behind.

There are five snow-pale wolves, white teeth glistening. Winter lean and grey as the clouds, run down the mountains by the storm.

They surround her in a rapidly tightening arc.

Cassandra’s focus narrows into one fine point, one horrible truth: she is too far away to head off the lunge, to put herself between Vivienne and harm’s way. But she moves—swiftly, bent in half, to close the distance between them. Everything else is forgotten. Lack of a sword has never stopped Cassandra.

Vivienne’s hands glow. A quick barrier will knock most of them back, buy a breath’s worth of time. But she has marched them hard all day, and neither are fresh for a fight. She’s only halfway there before the wolves, moving on instincts older than the mountain they stand on, attempt the kill.

The wolf closest to Vivienne leaps without so much as a snarl, a deadly whirl of white fur—the others growl and make their move before being snapped back by a lightning-quick wall from her left hand.

But the first wolf sinks its teeth deep into Vivienne’s forearm, drags her down to one knee. She grits out a sharp cry—the pain in it closes Cassandra’s throat--before her brow furrows in purest defiance. She looks the wolf dead in the eye as suddenly it whimpers, and Cassandra watches Vivienne freeze the beast inside out, from tooth to tail.

Cassandra is there, linking her hands into one iron-hard fist—a poor woman’s substitute for a pommel. She shatters the wolf in a swing that takes her whole body and leaves her knuckles bloody through her gloves. Then the alpha lunges forward, and Cassandra leaps to meet it, both creatures falling into the snow.

She wrestles it down. The peculiar smell of lightning, the acrid scent of the inside of a potion bottle, crackles overhead. One paw sweeps across her face, leaving long, shallow cuts across her cheek, the graze of teeth against her armor. It doesn’t take much time for her to pin the wolf, her arms tightening around its neck for a kill that takes longer than she would like. The body doesn’t go slack till the very moment of death, and then Cassandra leaps to her feet.

Vivienne administers a very well-placed lightning bolt to finish the last of them, and the pack lies dead. Cassandra is by her side in an instant, reaching for her arm. Blood already drips in the snow from the deep punctures, a clawed scratch on the inside of her shoulder.

Vivienne flinches, and her heart drops. Cassandra makes a low sound under her breath, gingerly takes her wrist between two fingers. In one slow, careful motion, she examines wound.

Several wolf’s teeth, still frozen solid, glimmer in her arm.


	2. part two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Josephine reels after the events of Haven, is visited by an otherworldly spirit, and attempts to rebuild what is broken with Leliana.

Josephine, carried by the tide of people streaming towards higher ground, barely notices the avalanche. It is this fact that will remain most tangibly unforgivable for all the years of her life to come. She misses the moment Haven disappears.

Josephine, who prides herself as the observer of all the details missed by the heavy-handed and sloppy, who knows her memory to be as solid as stone, is looking away as all they’ve made dies.

She does not know how she got outside, how she got down the path. Perhaps a soldier shuffled her along, or someone took her hand. She will never remember. She is inside the Chantry, rattled and scorched, and then she is outside without a coat, without boots, and breathing air sharp as knives, clustered between workers and women. Leliana is there, then gone. They find themselves beyond the mountain.

The screaming of the people echoes and cycles into one never-ending howl of sound—their terror, the palpable bitterness of their fear on her tongue—the blood on the ground, the dragging of the wounded, the sounds of those crying out to Andraste, to the Maker, to their friends when they were left behind, too injured to move, too heavy to carry.

Maker, to be a bleeding man too hard to carry. To be an ounce too heavy to save. In games of intrigue, Josephine makes sacrifices as is necessary. But they are not prices of flesh. This is just merciless calculus, built on cruelty and impossible decisions.

The smell of burning buildings, the char of ruined flesh. They tangle up in her own scent. They have been hiking from Haven for an hour and she can smell it as though she were still there. As though she were trapped under the snow, and beneath a sea of white, Haven still burns.

The cold unweaves her, a tapestry suddenly gone all to threads. Caught up in the spiraling panic, she does not see the trebuchet fire, crash its load into the mountain wall, or watch the incredible flood of snow decimate Haven completely.

She does not see Lavellan disappear beneath the white in one swift movement, like the hand of the god clearing a chessboard. Corypheus and his dragon, abandoned to the wind. All to which they pinned their hopes, disappeared.

But she hears the shriek rise among the crowd, the loud wail just before the hammerblow of all that snow, that ice, for miles and miles and miles. Farther than her arms could stretch.

By the time Josephine whirls about, it’s all gone.

She freezes there in place on the ledge, arms wrapped around herself, ankle deep in ice. She didn’t pull her coat from her office. She didn’t find the boots Leliana had hassled her about bringing, the ones sitting empty by her bedside each day and night for the past near-year. How smooth and quiet it all is now. The fire, doused. The howling, covered.

Ahead, Cullen bellows, _keep moving._ His voice ushers them along with the unwillingness of a cattle prod. After months and months of wondering precisely what Cullen is for, the night serves a very concise answer.

It is so cold.

A glimmer of metal catches her attention, casts her gaze down, and Josephine is suddenly staring at a woman, staring back at her.

She mistakes it for a reflection of herself in the winter wind. But only for a moment. The longer she stares, the more differences appear. Brown skin, wide eyes. But this figure’s nose is stubborn at the tip, not the bridge. Her hair, black as night, coils into tight curls, held back with a leather thong.

Instead of deep marks dabbed at chin and forehead, she sports scars that bisect her eyebrow, her lip, her cheek. One long mark runs along the tendons of her neck. And her face—a long mouth meant for smiling and smirking, a pointed chin, a jawline sharp enough to cut a hand on.

The most disarming piece of her is the thick swaths of summer freckles on her cheeks and forehead, freckles always there but grow darker under the bright sunlight of Solace and August in this deathly dark of winter. Why this tugs at Josephine most, she can’t say.

But they stand, and stare, and stare.

The figure stares up at her, the kind of gaze meant to find hidden things. She is armored in hard leather, with iron at her elbows, wrists, and shoulders. A brass key lies across her chest, strung about her neck on a black cord. It glimmers at Josephine.

The figure is not pleased. Her arms fold across her breast, and her eyes move, as though she sees a shadow over Josephine’s shoulder. But Josephine doesn’t move, not until the figure furrows her brow, and raises her hand, pointing.

When Josephine turns, Leliana stands there, silent. She holds a heavy black coat, lined with matted wool, tufted with fennec. Without a word she crosses the distance and folds it over Josephine’s shoulders, helps her get her arms through the too-long sleeves, buttons and belts it securely around her.

The coat smells like chickens and dirt. A farmer’s coat. Someone who no longer needs this coat.

“I’ll find you some boots,” is all Leliana says, turning to march off into the snow. Her words point like a compass, fresh with disappointment. Whether it is at the situation, herself, or Josephine is unknown. All three, more likely. Her eyes are empty.

Josephine swivels back, but the figure is gone, an empty ledge, an empty cliff face. Only snow. Only the rushing of the wind.

~~~

“Your penmanship is best,” Leliana mutters, sliding the quill and parchment across the three crates they’ve set up as make-shift tables. She stands, arms crossed, looking at the tall peaks of the mountains. The wind screeches in the distance.

Josephine sits, awkwardly bent over the surface, still wrapped in a dead farmer’s coat. The quill lays in her hand. She stares at the point.

Cullen paces, mantle discarded. His skin shines with sweat—he’s been doing his share of carrying the injured, setting up tents, making fires. The fire flickers in his steel armor.

“Let us begin,” he says, brusque and to the point, “with those we know for sure.”

“Minaeve,” Leliana answers instantly, and Josephine chokes. The mousy little mage who shared her office, who spent hours hemming and hawing over the vesicles in blight-wolf lungs. (Josephine did not know _grief_ could smell like dissected demon claws, or sound like the muttering of hastily scribbled notes. They will never happen again.)

But she has already launched into a list of other names, names Josephine does not know, and the tip of her pen stays still. Leliana goes through ten, twelve names before she notices. She lets out one controlled breath and turns away.

Cullen, suddenly at her shoulder, kneels down beside her. “It’s alright,” he says, and a rush of bile rises in Josephine’s throat. How could he, of all people, claim it—why is he, of all people, comforting her, when Leliana stands not two meters away, pretending Josephine is a ghost if she can’t be useful. But neither will give in and disappear.

“Put pen to paper,” he ushers, voice a touch hoarse after hours of bellowing orders. But just a touch.

Josephine watches brown fingers, broad and strong, gently encircle her wrist. She stares at where they touch. She does not follow the line of the arm to similarly broad shoulders, a freckled face with a long mouth. A stern and searching gaze, full of expectations.

Cullen says nothing. The fingers move her hand to the parchment. It should feel like a command, but the lift is too gentle, too careful.

“Good work,” Cullen says, like she’s a soldier who’s completed a successful parry. “Are you ready for the names?”

The fingers around her wrist squeeze. A curl of black hair brushes her cheek. Not her own.

 _I am going mad_ , she thinks, and nods.

He begins with Minaeve and lists every name Leliana did, in the exact same order. Then Leliana adds more names to the list, and Cullen consults a document brought to him by one of his captains.

The slender roll of parchment is half-full by the time they’re near done.

“How many recruits?” Leliana asks. “Foot soldiers?”

A thumb runs up the inside of Josephine’s wrist, a sliver of comfort. “And the workers,” she says. “We must not forget them.”

Cullen, long since gone back to pacing, grunts in agreement. He stops, looks back at the pass. A moment of silence.

“A hundred at least, then,” he says, voice low and steady. “We will probably breach one-and-fifty by the time we find a way out.”

“We are still without the Herald,” Leliana adds. “Cassandra and Vivienne—my agents say they waited too long at the pass, fighting over whether or not to leave her—and then the avalanche.”

Josephine takes a breath. “Are they gone?” she asks. Her hands have gone numb in the cold.

Leliana says nothing. Cullen gives her a crooked look, not quite a smile.

“Time will tell,” he says. He moves moves to pull on his mantle again—when the injured are settled, he will take a party to search for survivors, for stragglers, and, as it goes unspoken, the Herald and her Inner Circle.

“I cannot remember a time,” she says, her voice quiet enough Josephine must strain to hear it, “in the past eight years, when I could not tell you exactly where Cassandra was. At any moment.”

The fingers around her wrist disappear.

Josephine, the appointed scribe of death, does not write down their names.

~~~

Josephine follows Leliana through the camp, having been summoned by a listless twitch of her fingers. She had pledged not to follow, turning to find some other way to help or hide, only to run into the figure near-head on. Josephine looked up at her, followed those eyes to an outstretched hand, pointing to Leliana’s retreating back.

She tries to duck under the figure’s arm, but her eyebrow raises in dry amusement. _You can try_ , it says.

So Josephine turns back, and follows. Leliana does not wait for her to catch up as she plods through the snow. She does not turn to take her hand, or her arm. She leads, and Josephine putters behind.

She recognizes the tent as Leliana’s if only because it’s several inches taller than the others—Leliana likes to be able to stand and pace without having to hunch and bend at the waist every moment. Inside, as the tent flap falls closed, Leliana lets her hood fall back over her shoulders and rummages through a straw-filled crate without looking at her, without a word in edgewise.

For the first time, Josephine is small here.

Leliana draws out a heavy boot, well-made and most likely too large. _You have doe’s feet_ , she used to say, tinged with envy, nudging her leather boot against her shoe. Leliana was never one to adopt a well-used turn of phrase when she could easily make her own, and better.

Josephine toes off her shoes—brown and beaded with azure fleur-di-lis. They sit, wet and ruined, on the tent floor. She glances up, and Leliana stares at her. They’ve known each other for years, not counting years of flesh and sweetness, and this—this is something completely new.

She means to phrase it as a question. She truly does. Or as a kindness. But the words tumble out like stones, nearly breaking her teeth on the way out. “Stop looking at me like a wound,” she says.

Leliana pauses. And in that moment, Josephine sees everything.

Yvette loves a particular artist—a long-dead Antivan duchess whose work can be found on every street in the city, but her largest, most beautiful mural is in the servant’s hall of the king’s palace. On her fourteenth name-day, the king held a feast for the visit of a cadre of Rivaini princesses, each prettier than the last. Josephine exhausted herself simply getting express permissions from _Mama_ to allow Yvette to attend, and then truly worked herself to the bone getting her sister to stop wiling after the Rivainis long enough to sneak downstairs.

The lure of the scandal, should they have been caught, proved the best hook.

The picture they must have made. Fluttering down the stairs in the servant’s corridor. Yvette’s most beloved color at the time was chartreuse, a truly memorable period for her fashion sense, and possibly the worst hue to be bedecked in when sneaking through the shadows. A puffed taffeta cloud, the color of a sickly lime.

But the hall was empty—nobody lies idle while the king throws a feast, and they had snuck away during the desserts. They would miss the doves springing from the pudding, but it was a small price to pay for a heady adventure.

All the candleabras along the tables gleamed softly, the sconces on the wall whispering with dim light. And the great masterwork: mighty waves, high as four men stacked on each other’s shoulders, holding every shade of sea blue—the greyish, threatening loom of a storm, muggy summer green, cloudy autumn’s dull cerulean—crashing down. The thick white foam reared its head, showed its teeth: the birth of an Antivan dragon. As the drake rose, the white threaded with warm, sunny gold. The first breath of the sun, its first taste of power.

Yvette took her hand and pulled her close to the fresco, so close her nose touched the wall. (Yvette was too taken with the painting to take the opportunity to jest about Josephine’s nose—a true testament to the power of the art.) And Josephine noticed, for the first time, the painting was made by droplets. No bigger than the touch of a quill pen, the dot to finish a sentence.

Waves built by grains of sand. In the flickering of the candlelight, the sea churned, and the dragon’s gold-flecked teeth grinned with pride. The mere effort of a blink made the foam twist, the weight and absence of a breath in the lungs changed the way the touches swirled together.

Leliana’s control over each inch of muscle and gesture in her body has made studying her reactions an art form. To all—including Josephine, long ago—nothing was seen that she did not want seen. Survival, for certain, shaped her. Mastery of the Game lies in part with mastery of the most confident kind of acting. Every tiny piece must be perfect. Never a hair out of place, and Maker forbid a sigh out of place.

Or a blink. A twitch. Mark each, to find the way. Each change, small and precious and there, then gone. It has become something of a life’s work, for Josephine, to know Leliana when that is the last thing she possibly wants. Even now, at her wit’s end, without sleep, ragged from the day, and scarcely able to recognize herself in her own mirror.

Even now: a shifting of points. The weight of a breath, or a thought, changes the portrait.

Leliana’s eyes cast back down to the depths of the crate and its flimsy straw, and tugs out the last boot. She’s careful to brush every bit of errant hay from the surface. She doesn’t blink once. When she rises, a strand of red hair sticks to her cheekbone.

So—it’s true. Josephine is right.

Of course, then Leliana kneels at her feet.

She watches her peel off her gloves, lay them to the side in a neat pile, and wrap long, thin fingers around her ankle. Her hands are cold, always cold. She lifts, on instinct, and Leliana slides her foot into the first boot.

Soft cloth lies balled at the toe. The boots are too large, and this too planned. Josephine feels dizzy, knowing these were packed for her, knowing Leliana knew she would not be prepared for this, would not have the sense or the state of mind to do what was necessary.

“You have to carry yourself through this,” Leliana says, tugging the boot solidly to her knee. Her voice is quiet, strained, and she does not look at Josephine. It’s wise. If that statement was paired with a cutting look, Josephine would bleed.

The next foot, then, and Josephine raises her foot helplessly. Leliana touches her no more than a servant would. “If you want that from me, I can’t give it to you.” The boot secured, Leliana pulls her gloves on. (This is not new for them. But now, Leliana should squeeze her calf, let her fingers lingers on the toe of the shoe. Once she kissed her knee, and ever since Josephine hopes for repetition. Not tonight.)

She stands up, taller than any legend could paint Maferath, and pulls her hood back over her hair. Josephine, bereft of words, must tilt her chin up to look her in the eye. But Leliana is not interested in meeting her gaze. She finishes buttoning a glove.

“I can’t,” she repeats, not a protest but a confirmation. “I’m not that kind of lover.”

Josephine knows her own mouth drops open, her jaw unhinged. How stupid and surprised she must look, to be caught his unawares. To find out, a hundred miles from anything she knows, that she is alone as alone can be.

Leliana diverts her eyes first before she turns and sweeps out of the tent, and leaves Josephine standing there.

~~~

Josephine wanders out of the tent. Her bones ache, and her body begs for sleep, but none will come. Her pride keeps her standing, admittedly—she will not lay down while Leliana prowls the camp, while Cullen hunts through the mountains for signs of Lavellan. She tightens the dead farmer’s coat around her shoulders and shuffles back out into the snow.

The wind howls high on the other side of the mountain. How they are here, safe in this valley? It gusts hard and sharp as a knife, but that is all. Did Cullen know where to go—how else could he lead them to the spot? Or was it careless luck?

The math of it makes her head hurt, and the chance of it invites despair.

She wanders too close to where the surgeon works dutifully. The soft moans of the injured make their own music, clawing fingers digging into her sleeves, her shoulders. She shakes her head and moves away. She cannot talk a burn into healing itself. She cannot orate their way out of the storm. Nothing to be done.

She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, just for a breath. Her once-beautiful, wet slippers, sitting ruined in her tent, spring to mind. _You are as useless as your shoes._

And so she gives in to the despair. This much weakness she can take. A moment’s worth, to cap off a night of failure. She does not belong here. She is not meant for this. Josephine has weathered sorrow and disaster, but this is beyond even her most imaginative nightmares. Her throat clenches around a hard knot.

Then—calloused pads of fingertips on her chin. Thick callouses, heavy with work. She lifts her head to look into those deep brown eyes, the kind eyelashes, and the little smile of that long mouth.

 _Who are you?_ Josephine nearly whispers aloud, but bites her tongue. Speaking to an obvious apparition, whether from grief or madness, is not a line she wishes to cross just yet. Before, the figure appeared below her, and sat beside her—now she sees the figure is tall. Not as tall as Leliana, of course. But a knightly height.

One of those tightly-wound curls has escaped from its leather loop. Josephine reaches up and tucks it back behind her ear, just as she would when Yvette came back from painting by the coast, her hair made a mangle by the wind.

The long mouth smiles. A dimple appears, just one, puckering her left cheek. It dissolves cold, this smile. The warmth makes the blaze behind them burn brighter. Her dark eyes sparkle, warm with flame.

And then gently, gently, she turns Josephine’s head.

One of their clerks—they number too few to do anything but share between all of them—sways on her feet. She clasps a tablet and a pen, standing before crates and barrels and two wagons of supplies. She watches her hand reach out to steady herself, and then Josephine moves with all the quickness she can muster in too-large boots, apparition forgotten.

At her side, Josephine plucks the tablet and pen from her hands, steadying her with an arm at her back. She’s Rivaini-born, dark-skinned with hair braided up in a coif so tight not a hair has escaped in all the journey through the mountains. The circles under her eyes look like bruises.

More stunning is the fact Josephine cannot remember her name. The fact would scrape her clean if she didn’t feel as though she’d lost every faculty she had already.

“Let me take over,” Josephine says quickly. “My lady…”

She breathes, “Calla,” and doubles over. “I have to finish the inventory,” she wheezes.

“I can manage,” she assures. “Rest. Can you make it to your tent?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t have one.” Calla steadies herself, stands up, and tries to reach again for the tablet. Josephine clutches it tightly and holds it at arm’s length.

“I can, Calla.” She recalls the gentleness of her apparition, and emulates. The clerk is not a hard soldier in need of ordering. Her hand squeezes Calla’s arm. “You’ve done a lion’s work today. Rest,” she repeats. “There will be more tomorrow, and the next day.”

But Calla sways again, and Josephine gestures a woman with a shorn head and dressed in templar armor marching by. She jerks to a stop beside them at the motion, with a soldier’s precision, salutes with a steel arm across her chest and says, _Ser Briony, at your service._

Josephine gives her directions to her own tent, knowing well it will not please Leliana, and watches Ser Briony sweep Calla up swiftly. She holds her as though her bones are made of parchment, and Calla drops her head against her neck the moment she’s held aloft. But Briony adjusts her carefully, lifts her up just enough so forehead tilts, rests comfortably against her skin, instead of the gorget.

They trundle off through the snow. Josephine watches them go—peeling her eyes away is out of the question. The entirety of the brief interaction leaves her spellbound. What a small kindness, nearly lost to the wind and the snow.

She turns to the list on the tablet. Calla did not get far. Josephine knows her way around a supply manifest, has done inventory in the bellies of merchant ships tossed to and fro by monsoon waves.

A breath, to clear her mind, before she sets pen to paper, a hardtack ration gone uncounted. She ignores the strangeness that won’t abate—the feeling of someone watching the back of her head. Eyes that linger.

~~~

Josephine lulls herself into distance with the work. It’s far after midnight—the time unintelligible until the sunrise marks the dawn. The darkness of the witching hour grows heavier and heavier as the storm clouds rise. But they never part.

Numbers rise and fall like rows of embroidery from a needle under her fingers. Simple. Elegant. Idle. A soothing kind of calculus, because it requires no lives, and this far in the mountains, thoughts of suppliers are a joke.

There is only this, and just this. No replacing or restocking. What they have, they have. This many hardtack rations, or that many rolls of bandages. Wagon wheels, axles, druffalo hooves. Blankets, tents, bottles of quickly-brewed elfroot tinctures.

It is easier than breathing to forget each roll of bandage is measured against how much blood and stitchery lives just on the other side of the encampment. To count hardtack in rounds and stacks, instead of how many bites it takes to fill a mouth or an empty belly. How many hands a piece of firewood warms. How many feet.

Josephine forgets this, forgets the dying and the missing, and finds the back and forth of each line in the ledger as unchallenging as lullaby.

She glances up to take stock of what few spare blankets they have back, and that lone girl squats on a crate. She leans on one knee, legs spread comfortably. That curl has wiggled its way loose again. But her mouth straightens into a thin line. Her eyes settle on Josephine, a searching stare that leaves her breathless.

 _I’m here,_ Josephine snaps, knowing all too well what that look finds _. What more do you want?_

The eyes narrow, and she watches the figure soundlessly click her tongue. All expectation. As though she knows Josephine has passed the hours in solitude— _and don’t I deserve a moment’s peace?_

It takes her a moment to realize she’s said it out loud, as the figure regards her up and down. The words float to the ground, meaningless as snowflakes.

A cry goes up in the camp behind her. Josephine’s fingers grip the tablet. She does not turn. The figure stares up at her. Just as before, on the ledge, it takes long moments for Josephine to mark the differences.

Snow in her hair, too cold to melt away. Wind-whipped cheeks, hands that flex and flex to bring the feeling back into them. Ice on her boots, all the way up to her knees. She breathes shallowly, like the cold cuts into her lungs, like she’s climbed a mountain and back again. All her lines sag with exhaustion. There’s a little gesture Josephine has mastered in herself and now can see plainly in others—the repressed shiver in the bitterest cold. She watches the tiniest of vibrations in her shoulders. They echo, as though pelted by invisible wind.

 _Where have you been?_ Josephine wants to ask, reaching out, knowing if her fingers landed on the figure’s metal buckles they’d chill her fingers to the bone. Water droplets frozen on her face. Not tears, just—excess.

Her eyelashes are frozen. The dull brass key on its cord has slipped out of her armor, dangling in the firelight. It catches Josephine’s eye, and she can’t look away.

All the details slip into place. This warrior has been up the mountain and back. Why that strikes the match in her brain, Josephine will never know. But it’s clearer, suddenly, as though she’s remembered how to breathe after being held underwater. Other stories must hold other holy figures, but this is the Inquisition, and this woman—this woman has been seeking her lost Herald.

 _I know you._ The Maker’s bride, the only voice he hears in the dark night--sits dripping before Josephine, hardened by cold. Warmth does not fill her heart. Her soul does not take flight. Josephine just stares. That cry again—louder, a horn blowing and echoing across the mountain.

The figure does not point, or even give a hapless roll of her shoulder. But Josephine turns, knowing precisely what she’ll see.

Cullen and his soldiers clatter down the mountain, a black-haired elf supported between him and another knight. She watches Sera drop her bow in the snow and sprint quick as a starling across the snow, knocking Solas clear into a drift. Blackwall, of all people, follows, his running strides long and steady.

They meet Cullen and his people, Sera darting forward to wrest Lavellan from their arms, and instantly finding her too heavy to carry—though Josephine knows, certainly as she can tell anything, Sera would find a way to heft her across the Frostbacks on foot if need be. But then Blackwall is there, and they lift her between them, her head lolling back and forth like a doll’s.

Josephine whirls back to find her icy figure gone, having predicted precisely where she went, and then finds herself trudging forward, ledger firmly grasped in hand, heart sinking with every step.

She finds herself at the epicenter—Lavellan is whisked away to the medical tents, Cullen bends in half by the fire, and Leliana looms, a tall spectre in the shadow of a tent. She flips through something idly, and Josephine can tell by the track of her eyes she’s only half-reading.

Cullen’s voice cracks, low and hoarse with cold. “Rota is set,” he mutters. Water drips down his face, melted snow and ice from his hair. She wonders if his eyes could not help but tear against the wind, and freeze upon his cheeks. She will never know, if even if the face of the figure had not told her the whole story, eyelash by eyelash.

“We should not move,” he continues, “until she is well enough to walk. Too many wounded. But by then we can go.”

Leliana jerks up her head. “We do not move until we find Cassandra,” she interrupts, “and Vivienne.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Cullen is too tired for pleasantries, and for once, Josephine cannot blame him.

“Surely a force as large as ours is not hard to track,” Josephine attempts, like she could make peace. She lifts the ledger. “We cannot wait.”

They both glance at the inventory, and then at her.

“We will send searchers out at first light, when the shifts change.” Cullen does not even wait for the meeting to be called to an end—Cassandra, after all, is not here to pin him in place with a single look. The spaces around the fire are empty and incomplete, the pieces of a map with no compass, no markers for land and sea. He trudges off towards the tents where the injured lie, limping a little.

“What is wrong?” Josephine asks, quietly, once he is gone.

Leliana says nothing.

“We will find Cassandra and Vivienne. All is not lost.” Josephine reaches out, two fingers to touch Leliana’s elbow. Leliana stiffens and pulls away, crossing her arms tightly.

Just one little motion cracks the ice, cracks Josephine through her scalp and all comes spilling out. “Am I too calm for you now?” she asks blearily. “Too matter of fact?”

“This is not the time.” Leliana’s voice is gruff.

“So—a request to extend my hysterics.” Josephine circles around to face her. “What shall I do next? How shall I perform?”

She closes her eyes. “I cannot—“

“— _Carry_ me, yes, I remember. You will recall I never asked for it.”

The hardness in Leliana’s eyes takes her breath away. They are edged with disbelief. Rare. “Your panic spoke clearly enough,” she replies. “As did everything else.”

“I read the entirety of our Inquisition charter,” is Josephine’s retort. “Nowhere in the pages does it bar me from fear.”

Leliana looks back at the rest of the encampment. “They look to you,” she says simply. “They look to you, and see a woman out of depth. You made no attempt to hide it.” A pause. Her voice drops an octave. “Like a young girl.”

Josephine’s fingers clench as she battens down her own shame. “I apologize,” she mutters, “for needing to learn how to live through great tragedy.”

Leliana blinks, then glances down at the snow.

The opening is vast, and Josephine is too out of sorts not to take it. “After all,” she continues, “this is only my first apocalypse.”

The line of Leliana’s shoulders vibrates once, then goes still. It’s as good as a hung head from anyone else, and she suddenly feels ill. Caught in the calm center of a storm—why are they arguing? Why is this happening now, when everything else has gone to pieces?

Josephine opens her mouth to say her name, but Leliana cuts her off with a curt nod. “If I could have spared you, I would.” Then her mouth goes into a hard, thin line.

She stares up at her, searching that pale face, and a moment of crystal clarity—perhaps the first since fire and brimstone descended on Haven—appears. “You cannot think this is your fault,” Josephine murmurs.

“There is a clerk in your bed,” says Leliana, turning. “Take mine.” She walks off in the same direction as Cullen. Josephine watches her shoulders straighten, her spine gathering points until her back is one painted line of strength. Every inch of her bound tight against the wind—except the sound of her boots crunching through the snow. Each step is an echo of the answer they both know: yes, yes, yes. It is.

~~~

Josephine finds herself at the Herald’s tent in the late morning, bleary from exhaustion. She couldn’t sleep till after the sun rose, and even then, it was restless and sparse.

The flap is open—Josephine leans close, just to see. Lavellan is awake, propped up on a cot. She motions her in, and she nearly trips over Sera as she ducks inside. She’s balled up at the foot of the bed, bow in hand. Snoring. Waiting.

“Let her sleep,” Lavellan murmurs, lurching to her feet. Josephine is there in an instant, offering a hand, but she pushes it away. “I’m fine.”

Josephine hands her the staff sitting in the corner instead, and Lavellan accepts it without a word.

“Take a turn about the camp with me,” she says. “I need to walk.”

Josephine follows Lavellan outside, examining her in the periphery. Her hands are covered in bandages, and her neck. Someone has been dabbing healing ointment at the tip of her noise—the poultice-oil is glossy.

“Frostbite,” Lavellan says, and Josephine nearly jumps out of her skin. She never misses anything. “It was very cold.”

“I can’t tell you how glad we are you’re safe,” she says. “And well.”

“Are you?” Lavellan asks, and the question uproots Josephine entirely.

“Of course,” she says. “I’m fine.”

“Heard you weren’t.” The pit drops out of Josephine’s stomach.

The silence lingers. “It was—trying,” Josephine attempts, and Lavellan nods.

“Did you lock yourself in your office?” She tries to ask the question kindly, Josephine can tell, but it sends it spiraling back, and Josephine is at the mercy of memory.

_Cullen, giving the order to get them out of Haven. Lavellan, running back out—staff in hand, followed by Cassandra, Vivienne, and Varric. Let it hear you. The walls of the Chantry shaking. The roar of that dragon—a screech to rend heaven and earth. The worst sound Josephine has ever heard—beyond comparison, as the only death Josephine has ever heard was silent. She ran into her office to grab something—something that seemed too valuable to leave behind, but she can’t remember what it is. She suspects, now, it is something her mind made up._

_The dragon lands on the Chantry roof, and its cry reverberates through the stone, through the walls, and cuts into Josephine’s bones, never to be parted. Stone and dust fall from Josephine’s ceiling. The unmistakable scent of burning wood. The Chantry burns._

_Her fingers move to turn the key in the lock and then she freezes, her hands on the door, her feet rooted to the spot—everything unravels, every stitch holding her together. She can no longer breathe, or think. Her own name escapes her._

_Josephine—_

_She is going to die here, and that’s part of the contract she signed, part of the risk she undertook, just like standing on a ship and going out into open water—this is the enemy, the enemy she promised to fight with all her mind and heart. They are here, at her doorstep, but all Josephine’s swords are useless._

_Josephine—_

_Leliana, on the other side of the door, pounding at the wood. She cries her name, over and over._

“I did,” says Josephine, slowly.

Lavellan blinks. She wasn’t expecting an admission.

“Lucky Leliana was there,” she tells her.

Josephine nods. They don’t say anything else. Lavellan’s not one for the gentle touch.

“Let her know we have to move,” she continues, “tomorrow, or the day after. With or without the rest.” Her brow furrows.

“Where will we go?” Josephine asks, mouth dry.

Lavellan doesn’t answer.

~~~

After the conversation, Josephine finds a moment for herself to unspool like a roll of thread.

The novelty of paralysis has worn Josephine to the bone. Never in her life has she found herself so unable to move. She’s one for flight, even in the midst of fear—joining a dance where she knows none of the partners, caught in the corner of a negotiation. A knife at her throat, twice, and still—her hands never hesitate, her mind does not falter, her feet do not root into the ground with impossible weight. It has never been her way. Josephine prides herself on her nimbleness.

The hesitation the last days have brought her sinks into her muscles, a new tenant with no desire to leave. Has this always been here, she wonders, cold creeping into her heart. Has this always been possible? Is every moment of crisis now a gamble between her flexibility of spirit and chains, winding their way around each inch of her skin until the moment’s pressure robs her of her very ability to breathe?

For the third time in the last two days she finds herself rooted to the spot, her vision blurring at the edges. She’s found a secluded spot behind Lavellan’s tent, as secluded as an open camp in the valley of the Frostbacks gets, and breathes. Her head rests in her hands, her body curls in on itself. The conversation with Lavellan has made her insides ragged. The thought of talking about what happened makes it impossible to stand.

There’s a touch at her shoulder—the brush of a hip. She can feel the scabbard of a knife at her belt. It jostles against her, a little too close, an accident. She doesn’t need to raise her head to know the face that will be looking down at her, the reminder of her own madness.

 _Why are you here?_ she asks again. They are surrounded by believers, the only thing in this valley more numerous the snowdrifts. But here she is, at Josephine’s side. (She can’t bear to call her by her name—it would make it all too real.) Josephine, who hasn’t earnestly set foot in a Chantry for years. Josephine, who has never lit candles at the altar.

There’s no answer, of course. In the silence, Josephine closes her eyes and dares her to leave. Dares her to be gone when she opens them. But she doesn’t move. She stands, resolute. The figure waits with a patience Josephine has never known, not from a lover, parent, or confidante.

It comforts. Josephine stands.

The figure sticks to her side as she wanders through the camp. She doesn’t lead her, doesn’t point or guide. She just follows, close enough their shoulders might jostle were she not a ghost, a spirit, or a figment of Josephine’s imagination. She does not glance over, does not examine the wry curls, the scarred face, the sprinkling of tender freckles.

It takes her a long while to find Leliana, but it gives her time. It is hard to know the bond between lovers might not survive a trial; harder still to know you are the trial itself. Her indelible memory plucks at every conflict between them since they met all those years ago. None are like this. None rank comparison.

She does not allow herself to think of the first time she kissed Leliana (by the docks in Val Royeaux, gloriously sunny, a press of lips against a cheek, then the corner of her mouth, then--), or when they first made love (a handwoven rug on the floor of Josephine’s quarters in the Winter Palace, so quickly Leliana only took the time to remove her gloves). It is stupid to try to gather all the things you are about to lose. Better to let them drift off. Let them go. A captain does not count his gold pieces as his schooner sinks to the belly of the ocean.

Leliana is in their tent—if it’s still theirs. She examines a map, hands resting on a table. Josephine stands at the threshold. Leliana pretends not to notice her. Her hood is pushed back, red hair covering the elegant, pale lines of her face.

“I want you to know,” Josephine says, without pause, “I did not unlock the door.”

Leliana goes perfectly still. Her eyes still move back and forth across the map. An old trick.

“My hands were on the threshold.” She crosses her arms. “I never moved them. I was---“ She searches for a word. “Caught. My spirit left me behind in my own body. If you had asked me my name, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I couldn’t breathe, or feel my hands.” Her fingers clench reflexively, to remind herself they still exist. “They were inches from my eyes. I don’t know--” She is proud of how steady her voice is, even if she has to stop.

Leliana’s entire attention rests on Josephine. It always does, but she rarely shows it so obviously. It’s all the focus of a nocked arrow. Her eyes watch the movements of Josephine’s lips, mark her breaths as they attempt to remain even, examine her hands as they clench and unclench. Watches her wind in on herself in her own anxiety, her own fear.

But Josephine remembers the resolute patience of that figure, the figure with boundless time, to whom Josephine was no more burden than a shaft of moonlight on the snow, or a shadow in the dark. How even in this moment, the moment where everything will sever— _I am not that kind of lover_ —there is time. Time enough.

So she gathers her bravery. It takes a breath, and then another, but she meets Leliana’s eyes squarely.

“I don’t think I should be here,” says Josephine, and since their first steps from Haven, damn the consequences, she tastes freedom.

If they were vastly different women, Josephine is sure Leliana would slap her. Instead, she says, eyes turning hard, “This is a useless exercise,” and that’s brittle enough.

“I am trying to tell you what occurred,” Josephine responds, her hands clenching in her pockets.

“I know what happened,” Leliana says. “Now we move forward.”

Josephine does not mean to whinge, but it happens anyway. “You fail miserably as a confidante.”

The withering look of Leliana’s response brings her back to the tent the night before: _I cannot carry you._

“I am not asking you to comfort me,” Josephine says. “I am not asking for the softness of your hand. I want to put us on common ground. I want you to know what happened.”

“You locked yourself inside your office.” She turns back to her maps, her charts, and Maker-knows-what. “You nearly burned to death inside a collapsing Chantry before coming to your senses. That is all I need to know.”

Josephine stares at her. “For what? Preparation?”

Leliana does not answer.

“I must look to your example,” she says. “I wonder what it is like to never show fear, and never know it. I am a poor student to have followed you all these years and never picked up the trade.”

“I did not think you capable of hysterics,” Leliana mutters.

“I did not think an archdemon would land on the roof of my home,” Josephine bites out, because that’s what it was. “Look at the two of us. Victims of surprise.”

The pause is long. Josephine exhales.

“I want to tell you _why_ ,” she says, and her voice is no longer steady. “I want to understand this. It grips me even now, and I cannot—I cannot do it alone.”

She remembers the figure at her side, its eternal, blessed patience.

“I won’t feel ashamed,” she says, after a gulp of air, “to need that.”

Leliana turns. “I cannot hear you rationalize it,” she says. “I do not want to know how afraid you were.”

The way her voice drops— is as jarring as a shattered glass pane.

“Why does that break you, I wonder?” snaps Josephine, drunk on the upper hand. “Is it possible you need it too?”

“No good will come of it.”

Josephine throws her hands in the air. “What good comes of _this?_ ” she hisses. “Shoving each other away as though nothing happened.”

The silence that follows is too cold.

Josephine realizes her mistake as she watches Leliana take a breath. She is about to get exactly what she asked for.

“I am ashamed,” Leliana says. “I stood at that door, praying I could get you out, and all the while I thought—”

She stops. The silence is very precise—that _whoosh_ of air before a knife slides cleanly between two ribs.

“‘Maker,’” recites Leliana, each word perfectly heard, “‘why do I love a coward?’”

The knife slides in, twists. Josephine’s hand covers her mouth.

“I have failed you in every way,” Leliana continues, arms crossed. The effect of her silhouette in the moonlight is disarming and dramatic. “I let this happen, and then I did not protect you.”

Josephine still recovers from the thousand pinpricks the world _coward_ puts in her skin, the fact that the first time she has spoken of love between them it is in disappointment. “Because you recruited me?” She tilts her head. “I had every opportunity to say no.”

“I led you here,” Leliana brushes on, “and I didn’t prepare you for any of it.”

“My contract does not include a clause for you to act as my shield.”

“But mine does,” she says, and turns away. “I told Cassandra—I will only bring her here if I know she is ready.”

Josephine grits her teeth. “Then you made a foolish promise. No one can guarantee that. We are at war.”

“I did not think,” Leliana continues, voice quiet, “I would have to protect you from yourself. I have never seen you lose your head, even at the worst of times.”

It is too much—the double standard of it, the expectation, the hypocrisy. Between the two of them, there’s enough unmitigated hubris to fuel a small nation, and now it poisons everything.

“You were just as afraid,” she mutters. “You could have broken down the door. Picked the lock.” Perhaps not, with the key, but Leliana could not have known. “You didn’t. You screamed my name instead, and pounded on the door like a fool.”

The words are too sharp, but perhaps Leliana must also be cut down for them to have any kind of understanding about what happened. If there is to be movement forward. If there is to be anything at all.

“You were just as afraid,” Josephine says. “I won’t be shamed for it.”

Leliana turns back to her papers, her hands on the table. A thought occurs: _she must be cold_. Then Josephine realizes, no—Leliana is trembling, so slightly she can barely see it.

She says her name, once, without reply. She goes to the table and tugs Leliana’s hands away from their work and holds them, holds them until Leliana lifts her fingers to the tendons of her neck. Her skin is bitterly cold. Josephine suppresses a shiver as a thumb seeks her pulse. But it is a gentle touch.

“Somewhere in time,” says Leliana, “there is the world where the key does not come out of the lock.”

And the Chantry crashes down in flames on Josephine’s head, and her story ends. “I know,” she says.

“I cannot make myself imagine anything else.”

She reaches out, her arms wrapping around Leliana’s waist. She takes a step forward willingly. “Then we are in the same place,” she whispers.

There are no words to talk about how to heal this, for Leliana to apologize, for Josephine to make her meaning plain. A moment beyond language. Josephine arches up on her tiptoes, and Leliana hesitates, her thumb sweeping across the flesh of her pulse, before bending to kiss her.

Chaste, at first—a lady’s kiss, a courtship kiss, before a rush of breath inspires her to part her lips. And then Leliana pulls her up, a motion of unbendable strength, until her feet no longer touch the ground.

It is the middle of the day. Outside the wind blows, and the smell of burnt meat over a cooking fire wafts through the tent. Two soldiers spat over whose turn to rest it is. Leliana peels her out of her overlarge coat, folds her down on the bedroll, a knee parting her legs. The chill of her fingers, when they finally find warm skin, sets Josephine into shivers that will not stop.

It will do.

~~~

The sun has set by the time they exit the tent, Josephine dressed by a pair of careful and exacting hands in breeches and linen, and wrapped in the ugly coat once more.

Leliana kisses the smooth expanse of her wrist before buttoning her gloves. She leaves without a word. She knows it is a promise, not an absence.

Josephine watches the back of her head as she follows her out into the snow. Someone is humming in a nearby tent—a Chantry hymn Josephine never learned. She watches Leliana’s back straighten, hears a familiar, birdlike voice take flight. It startles a clerk into dropping a stack of reports. An old soldier, bandaging his ankle, _harrumphs_ and joins, his voice scratched and low beneath his breath. Someone behind her joins in Orlesian, a heavily accented baritone.

A brush against her cheek—like a curl of hair from a friendly face.

She turns. She’s ready now: to demand why their holiest of martyrs appears to her, her of all people. But no one is there. She thinks she sees footsteps in the snow—small, light, heading out of camp, and up the mountain.

The fire burns brightly. The sound rises, a rival to overtake the wind as it rears back and howls. It shudders through camp, blowing snow here and there until the marks disappear.

She can hear Leliana’s voice, a perfect golden thread, a loop that settles around her heart, singing as she moves to her next task. Josephine slides her hands in her pockets to warm them.

What she finds there sends her heart rushing wildly against her chest. Her gasp is too quiet to be heard. The song has spread across the camp, across the medical tents and surgery, to the supply caravan, to the soldier’s bedrolls.

The song unfurls in the shadow of the mountain. The fire blazes, red and gold. Josephine’s fingers curl around a brass key.


	3. part three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra and Vivienne find a way forward.

It takes an agonizingly long while to find another shelter in the mountainside. Every hour grows colder. Cassandra moves precisely at Vivienne’s pace, their shoulders bumping more often than not. She considers offering to carry her again, but the hard look in Vivienne’s dark eyes as they press forward makes her reconsider. She holds her arm to her chest in a way that plainly states she resents the need to do so.

Cassandra knows the feeling well.

They find a cave, the entrance too wide for her taste, smelling of rotting carcasses. A makeshift den for the wolves. Vivienne sits on the ground, casting small, silver magelights and a warm circlet of red-violet fire. Cassandra turns away and strips off her armor, then her gambeson, then her shirt. The chill bites at her skin, and she shivers despite herself.

“Seeker.” Vivienne’s voice, strained but steady.

Cassandra balls up and tosses her shirt, stained with sweat and coppery tinges of blood. It lands perfectly in her lap. But Vivienne only stares up at her.

That gaze catches Cassandra. It traces the lines of her shoulders, the thick, dragging tracks of scar tissue on her flesh. It lingers, careful as a fingertip, and slides from a claw-mark on her breastbone, down her sternum, and pauses at the hard muscles of her stomach.

Cassandra freezes under its careful touch, the way it looks and looks and refuses to be caught.

She bends at the waist to scoop her gambeson from the cave floor. She slides her arms inside and buttons the front so quickly she has to go back and redo half of them. “You need bandages,” she says, and sits next to her.

She angles herself to face the cave entrance, to keep watch. _No one will come_ , sighs an unpleasant voice in her head. _Your test of that has already come, and failed._ It makes Cassandra clench her fingers.

Vivienne unbuttons her sleeve. Cassandra takes her shirt and begins ripping it methodically into long strips. Each tear is a sharp pull back into reality, and then the sleeve is rolled back and unhooked.

The punctures don’t lie in neat lines, but nature’s same asymmetry. A constellation, a wolf’s mouth—all a connected whole despite themselves. Cassandra takes Vivienne’s arm, her thumb carefully running over her flesh . Her dark skin is utterly peerless. Smooth enough she almost pulls her hand away, her callouses too rough to drag against her.

Vivienne tenses.

“Will you be able to heal them?” Cassandra asks, eyeing the embedded teeth. There are three of them, thawed and glinting.

She shakes her head and says, “I’m not a healer. The basics are easy enough. I can stop the bleeding.” She glances at Cassandra’s head, and she remembers the shallow cut that lay there.

She pinches the crown of one tooth, testing its bite.

“Do them as quickly as you can,” Vivienne says, only a slight breathlessness betraying her.

Cassandra holds her arm with her a firm grip, fingers in place. “On three,” she says, and Vivienne nods. “One, two—“

She thinks of it like stitching, or parrying—a rhythmic exercise that requires an exacting and repetitive effort. First tooth, second tooth, third tooth. Each slides out of Vivienne’s skin without leaving any pieces behind. She makes no sound of pain, no whimper. Blood rises to the surface—Vivienne clasps her hand over the wounds, eyes closed, and a shadow of silver light gleams between her fingers.

An exhale.

Cassandra reaches, unpeels Vivienne’s fingers. The marks still linger there. They will scar, she thinks, and tamps down the resulting pang of wretchedness.

“You should have run,” she says matter-of-factly, and begins wrapping the first strip of her shirt around the wounds. “I hear you can touch the Fade and disappear.”

“It must be timed precisely.” Vivienne’s eyes are still closed. “It requires a substantial amount of mana.”

“So?” Cassandra begins wrapping a new strip.

“Next time,” Vivienne says, “I shall let you fight the pack of wolves alone.”

Her fingers stop their work. “You did not need to this for me,” Cassandra says, harder than she means.

“Abandonment is not my habit,” is her answer, and hot shame flushes up Cassandra’s spine. She finishes wrapping Vivienne’s forearm in silence. Once the last knot is tied, she releases her arm.

Vivienne reaches up, a finger on Cassandra’s chin. She tilts it gently to one side, examining the claw marks on her face. She raises an eyebrow.

“Save it,” Cassandra says.

Vivienne _tsks_ under her breath. “Just a touch.” Her thumb begins to wander up Cassandra’s jaw. “I am asking, Seeker. As requested.”

Cassandra sets her mouth in a hard line.

“I have let you play the surgeon.” Vivienne nods to the spot by the fire where three jagged wolf’s teeth sit in a perfect pile. “It’s no more effort than striking a match.” Her thumb sweeps back and forth, once.

The motion paralyzes Cassandra, but Vivienne, of course, pays no mind. “Unless you pray for stripes,” she murmurs, “to match this one.” And an impeccable fingertip, surprisingly warm, traces a circle where the scar along her jaw ends.

One terse nod is enough for Vivienne. She turns Cassandra’s head to the side, letting her cheek rest in her hand. “Do you think I am incapable of saying _slow the pace_ , Seeker?” she remarks, and then her thumb begins a slow descent down the first claw mark. The magic stings, bracingly cold.

“No,” Cassandra mutters.

“Both our demons were hard at work today,” she says. The next line is just as slow. “Your pride merely has stronger legs.”

She grits her teeth. “Don’t excuse me. Don’t excuse your arm.”

Vivienne sighs. “A very small price,” she tells her, “for neither of us torn to pieces.”

Cassandra does not meet her eyes out of defiance. Vivienne sighs again, but if she’s not mistaken, there’s a tone of warmth under it. A—fondness. (What _pith._ Vivienne has no reason to be fond of a comrade who leaves her in the snow to be snapped at by beasts.)

“Are you the type of Andrastean,” Vivienne asks, genuinely surprised, “vulnerable to self-flagellation?”

Cassandra does not mean to snort, but it happens anyway. Vivienne purses her lips to keep from smiling.

“I hoped not,” she says. “Just stubborn.”

“There’s something about that,” Cassandra says, as Vivienne begins the last clawmark. She raises an eyebrow.

“One of my old teachers.” A brother who hadn’t touched a sword in twenty-years, taught mathematics and repaired the oldest tomes in the library by candlelight. “He used to say all Andraste’s servants at the White Spire were either mabari, groveling in the dirt, or rams, kicking up mud.”

“You identify as the latter, I presume.”

“I think his point,” Cassandra says, “was that we were all idiots.”

The tiny purse of those lips again. It shouldn’t feel so absurdly like victory. The sting on her cheek suddenly disappears. It’s over.

“He would have hated the idea,” she says, “of a Herald. Andraste needs no glorified trumpeter.”

Vivienne’s hands falls away from her face, and it takes all Cassandra has not to chase that hand. She had hoped for one more mark. Perhaps hunger and cold are beginning to take their toll on her senses.

The reminder of the Herald unspools a very quiet silence between them.

They look out the cave entrance, where the darkness falls, and the wind begins to catch.

“The chances of her survival—“ Vivienne begins, and a sharp shake of Cassandra’s head silences her.

“She lives.” Cassandra clenches a jaw.

“You cannot know,” she reminds her.

She grunts in response.

“Is this belief,” wonders Vivienne aloud, “or just a rejection of circumstances?”

“I see no difference,” she mutters.

A pause. “Your Andraste asks for much,” Vivienne says. She does not mean it the way the faithless do, implying Andraste has all the meaning of an errant coin at the bottom of a pocket. She means _yours_ as in _yours_ , as though Cassandra’s Andraste and her own are merely two flowers from the same tangle of weeds.

It makes her head hurt. “Whatever the case,” she says briskly, “her eye is not on us, and for the better.”

That makes Vivienne raise her eyebrow. “Is our situation so easily mended?” she asks wryly.

“Andraste is the Maker’s sense of priority.” Cassandra does not like to speak overmuch of her faith, even being a Seeker of Truth. It is something for the mothers and sisters, those blessed with articulation of miracle. Her understanding of it is—simple. Unyielding.

“How practical,” says Vivienne.

“She knows which voices must be lifted.” Cassandra can feel herself flushing. “We will be fine without her.” Her hand curls into a fist, a promise.

“Ah. She only seeks out the most destitute,” Vivienne says, dangerously close to a drawl. After all, they are bloodied, hungry, cold, directionless, and without weapons. “We must be disappointments in that regard.”

“I find it comforting,” Cassandra says, and the remark spurns a low, dry laugh.

**~~~**

“I am fine,” says Vivienne.

Cassandra groans quietly under her breath. “This is not an attempt at control.” She rubs her temple. “Just sense.”

“Again,” Vivienne corrects, “you are neither my commanding officer, nor a mage with understanding of the craft. We will be well.”

A deep breath. “I know,” Cassandra says. The end of the world brings about every possibility, including new dimensions of embarrassment.

“Then why do you continue to comment?” Her look pins Cassandra like a dagger.

“An offer,” she mutters. “Not a command. All I said was—“

“’Put out the fire,’” Vivienne interrupts with a blocky imitation. “’No need for it.’”

“You already maintain it and the wards,” Cassandra blusters, “and the lights, _and_ you are hurt.”

A reminder of the day’s weaknesses does nothing to soften Vivienne’s gaze. “I will inform you when I am overcome,” she murmurs. “Pay no mind. Worry for yourself.”

“Vivienne, you are _cold_ ,” Cassandra snaps, at the end of her rope.

She blinks. Her gaze does not abate, so Cassandra barrels on in the only way she knows how.

“I—am trying to be courteous,” she says, remembering her snide comment from the day before. “I made a journey with a mage, once. Traveled with him long enough to know him as well as my own sword. Even a light takes work. I won’t take it for granted.”

Vivienne raises her eyebrows on _made a journey_ , and they rise slightly higher by the time Cassandra manages to shut her damned mouth. She has been around Leliana too long to be surprised when a skilled player makes assertions she had no intention to reveal. She did not hesitate or stutter; her voice did not catch in her throat. But Vivienne is a worldly woman, a queen of the Game, and they devour the uninitiated like novels.

It was not a confession she intended to make at this juncture, and her embarrassment leaves her stumbling and silent.

She abruptly stands and goes to inspect the entrance of the cave. Vivienne’s wards are perfect, but her habit doesn’t change. The amount of blood rushing to her face makes her vision swirl a little. _Bank your flame. I am enough._

It was an attempt, she tells herself, to make good. To be useful, after a long day of traveling empty-handed. Cassandra does not respond well to being taken care of. She must offer, give, or face the fact she is empty.

The light in the cave dims.

Her heart thuds against the chest. Foolish. She turns, slowly, inconspicuously, on her heel. Vivienne makes a small rotation of her wrist, and the mage-lights shrink until they wink into darkness.

Cassandra stands, watches as Vivienne reaches into her red-and-violet fire, curling her long fingers into a gentle fist, and the fire fades into the dimmest of blazes, soft and warm, as though it may roll over and fall asleep in the late hour.

Vivienne does not look up at her, or motion her over, or do anything that might be construed as _asking_ , no tangible acceptance. Instead, she watches her fire, low and pliant, and waits.

The effect is magnetic. Her feet move her forward before she can think better of her own offer. She lies down, her back pressed against the cave wall. Vivienne’s silhouette breathes in, a moment of iron against the dim light, and then recedes, curving into the spot next to her.

Cassandra raises her arm, hovering solidly over her waist. Asking. One long moment passes, and then another.

Fingers wrap around her wrist and tug the limb down until it hangs rather non-committedly over her hip. Cassandra won’t make assumptions of closeness.

Not a minute passes before Vivienne shivers a little, and says, “Make good on your promise, Seeker. You promised me a ward against freezing here in permanent exhibition.”

Cassandra’s arm tightens, and then they are pressed together, back to chest, arm in arm. Vivienne stiffens—a reflex, not a statement. Cassandra’s made a lifelong study of muscles and their movement, knows the natural hesitations, but her heart beats wildly against her chest, hard enough she fears Vivienne will feel it against her back.

But she only sighs.

“What?” Cassandra asks.

“We smell of dog,” Vivienne answers, and without seeing her face she can picture the wrinkling of her nose. She snorts, and Vivienne’s dry sigh in response carries an ease of her spine. A degree of loosening.

Cassandra cannot linger on how close they are pressed together, despite layers of clothing. Her nose is not even an inch from the nape of Vivienne’s neck, their knees hooked smoothly in place. After all, she promised utility. She will deliver on _something_ today without fault.

“I had never killed _beasts_ before the Inquisition,” says Vivienne thoughtfully. “I find it rather wretched.”

Cassandra’s never given a second thought about it. “Do you not count demons?”

She makes a thoughtful sound. “Beasts are hapless,” she says. “They do only as they must. I find demons are conniving enough to warrant their own category.”

“You’ve never hunted?” Cassandra asks. Even the nobility of Orlais still participated. Cassandra remembers being weaseled by Leliana and Most Holy into a series of sessions as accompaniment. To be flouted as the Hero of Orlais, to be pushed about as a pawn in one of their machinations—nothing irked Cassandra more. But to be the Right Hand was to be the hand that touched the people, so she bent her head and went. (Not quietly. She snipped at Leliana for hours after each trip, demanding to know the precise reasoning for every moment she spent out riding in the fields with drunken nobles.)

Cassandra hates many things, but found _hunting for sport_ numbered among the upper echelon. Nothing more pointless than killing something for exercise.

But Vivienne goes very still under her arm, and Cassandra wonders if somehow even in being silent she has offended. If they weren’t pressed together, with no room between them to hide anything, she’s sure she wouldn’t even notice. The reaction is that small.

“Not beasts,” Vivienne says, and leaves it there.

Cassandra flexes her fingers in a practiced pattern to keep them from going numb, before Vivienne reaches forward and takes one of her hands for examination.

“What hands, Seeker,” Vivienne remarks, the pad of her thumb running over the calloused mounds.

Cassandra was trapped in a wagon with one of Leliana’s agents, once—an assassin masquerading as an incredible palm-reader. She unfolded her hands just like this, like an herb-woman examining flowers, and told her the name of each topographic element.

What a shame to have forgotten the terms, as Vivienne’s fingers touch each mountain, each hill, and renames them for her own.

“I’ve ruined them,” Cassandra says, unable to stopper a dry chuckle.

Vivienne makes a soft sound of disagreement under her breath, her fingertips smoothing over the thick callouses with fascination. It occurs to Cassandra how Vivienne, despite every complaint of contrariness from all over the Inquisition, rarely says the word _no_ aloud. She has never heard her say it.

“Is a fortress less of a wonder than a marble column?” she observes, bending her fingers back, arching her wrist.

“Yes,” Cassandra admits, and she can _feel_ Vivienne struggling to not roll her eyes.

A thumb strokes down the tendons, and Cassandra can no longer both watch and experience the touch at the same time. Her eyes focus on the swoop of Vivienne’s hairline, shorn in a perfect curve.

“One is carved, the other constructed. Medium does not determine marvel.” She takes her hand and suddenly Cassandra’s thumb runs along the impressions of Vivienne’s palm.

“Yours do not need examination,” Cassandra mutters, self-conscious.

“But they are _cold_ ,” is Vivienne’s response. The gentle mockery of Cassandra’s earlier declaration makes her cheeks flush.

She recognizes the callouses—she forgets, sometimes, that Vivienne also fights with a blade. The particular roughness on the fingers. Vivienne takes care of her hands with balms and wax, never fights without gloves. Hands made by work, instead of ruined by it. She traces a scar, born at the divot of Vivienne’s thumb and running in a deep, stark line across her palm.

The familiarity refocuses her vision. “You tried to catch a sword,” Cassandra blurts out.

“Indeed,” Vivienne murmurs, and Cassandra knows—even though she can’t know, she can’t see it—that she smiles, a wickedly small upturned curve of her lip. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Anyone who picks one up.” Cassandra stretches open her fingers to demonstrate. “I have several.” The scars are less noticeable now, after learning just how to do it—but.

“My first trainer as a knight-enchanter,” Vivienne says, “picked one of us each day and fought us at full strength. You learn nothing from holding back.” Cassandra cannot tell if these are her words or her teacher’s. “He would fight us until we couldn’t stand.” She flexes her fingers. “I think he found me a suitable challenge. I caught his blade, just once.”

Cassandra blinks. “You should no longer have a hand.”

“I froze my own skin,” Vivienne says. “When the blade swung down, it stuck there.”

Cassandra does not comment on the pain it must have caused, or ask _why_ , because she already knows the answer. There is no point in trying unless one is prepared to try everything, no matter the cost.

And it reeks of genius.

“Did it work?” she asks.

Vivienne shakes her head. “For a moment,” she admits. “For a moment, I thought I was the first woman in the world to hold a spirit blade and not bleed.”

A silence. “Weren’t you?” Cassandra says, an eyebrow raised.

“I forgot about his other hand,” Vivienne says. “I did not wake up for an entire day and night.”

For the second time in their brief respite, Cassandra senses they skirt a stillness in Vivienne, an admission of a truth that is only the tiniest piece. A cobble in a stone roadway. A thumbprint on a pane of glass.

Cassandra’s favorite Nevarran legend as a child was a cautionary tale—a swordsman who climbed a mountain without gloves or shoes as an offering to the old gods. (She particularly liked the part where he bled whole rivers down the stony face—the stones were so sharp, and his soles so raw.) At the top of the mountain lay a lake, and inside the lake lay a sword. The details of the sword don’t matter—sharp enough to split a hair in two, encrusted in rubies, forged from an emperor’s sovereigns—all that Cassandra remembers is that it only appeared to the worthy. That was the challenge.

The swordsman sat at the lake’s edge, and saw nothing. Undeterred, he waited. He waited until his bones fasted into brittleness, his skin wasted to paper, and his eyes went dull and dark. He never saw a thing. The wind eventually carried his bones to heaven.

Cassandra never approved of tale’s moral, if it can be discerned at all. (Do not be tempted by possibility?) But the journey and the purpose never lost their luster.

When they touch that stillness—when Vivienne comes too close to the truth, and takes a breath instead—Cassandra knows she kneels at the edge of a lake, waves lapping at her knees, and sees a golden hilt. The long, water-broken line of a blade.

**~~~**

Talking, for the first time, serves as cure between them.

The same year Vivienne underwent her Harrowing at Ostwick, Cassandra joined the Seekers of truth. They can both use their blades in either hand—Vivienne prefers the left, for additional surprise, and Cassandra prefers the right, for ease of symmetry.

When Vivienne says, _your friend_ a little too casually—meaning the mage Cassandra mentioned before, it is Cassandra’s turn to tense and mutter, _he died at the Conclave_ , before they flutter back into silence.

Vivienne hums under her breath. “Would he have joined your Inquisition?”

The _your_ is too pointed for her taste, and makes the fight from the night before tumble back before them. “He and Lavellan would see eye to eye,” Cassandra says, because it’s true. “Her choices at Redcliffe would make him—happy.”

Silence. Long silence. Cassandra worries at her lip with her teeth, and barrels forward with what must be said. “Is that what you believe?”

Vivienne tilts her head inquisitively, even in its place upon the ground.

“That you do not hold a place there.” The quiet rumble of her own voice is too intimate for this position. “That it isn’t yours, as much as it is mine.”

“The fact you must ask the question,” Vivienne says, “is surely an answer.” A long pause. “I had not fought at the Herald’s side until Haven.”

Cassandra, who rarely is _not_ at Lavellan’s side, winces. “Perhaps—“

“You described it as a deluge.” Vivienne’s voice grows cold and curt. “A deluge of my opinions. If I am not here to lend my hand, I lend my mind.”

No questions lie there. Cassandra waits. Vivienne evokes a strange patience in her.

“Structure and protection.” Vivienne’s fingers curl, just slightly, where their hands rest together. “Mages need it, and the war only proves my point. They were run out of every village in Thedas before they found us. Mage children have nowhere to turn for shelter or teaching. They resort to blood magic to survive. They face the Fade without protectors.” She takes one measured, perfect breath. “I gave her two questions.”

She pauses, here. “What were they?” Cassandra says.

“Who cares for the defenseless?” asks Vivienne. “Where are the Tranquil?”

The question hardens her spine, changes the elegant restfulness of her pose into a fighter’s stance with just the adjustment of a few vertebrae. As though she expects Cassandra to stubbornly refute, to draw her sword and duel.

And then the question stands, unfurled and full of spines. “Where are the Tranquil, Seeker?” She repeats it again, as though she cannot truly believe it herself.

Cassandra licks her lips. Her mouth is too dry, and she will wither and die before admitting she does not know, and that she has not spared a thought for them until this very moment, this very second, lying on the floor of a dank and cold mountain cave.

“The Herald does not always find favor with my opinions,” Cassandra says. That is an understatement, but she chooses polite phrasing. “I believe in mending the infrastructure of the Chantry. She does not.”

Vivienne’s hands don’t clench, don’t grit their nails into Cassandra’s flesh. If anything, they rest softly, as though waiting to be carried. “I led a hold of mages for many years,” Vivienne says. “I know the Chantry, I know Orlais better than my own vanity table. But there are so many willing knees waiting to bend. I will wait for her to remember mine.” Her voice softens, just by a note. “How iron-strong, and wise, and good,” she murmurs. “How your Inquisition forgives with a full heart. Your Inquisition in love with redemption. How it treasures each mage under its wings.”

The _but me_ resounds like an echo. The power of an illusionist: Vivienne makes her know the very words she will never, ever say. That is a kind of magic, just as much as the fire.

“No,” says Cassandra. It is all she can think of to say.

Vivienne’s laugh is too cold to hold any amusement. “You most of all,” she says, “know the idiocy of a sword languishing in a sheath.”

“She mistakes you.”

“You mistake me.” Cold rushes down her spine—after all, Cassandra sits upon the war council. It is Cassandra’s duty to present solutions, to ferret not one, but many paths. “Perhaps next time it will only take a heavy summer storm, and not an avalanche, for you to ask for my thoughts on the Inquisition.”

And there it sits.

Cassandra takes a breath, the air rattling down to her lungs. She reels—there is no way to make amends. No way to undo the truth—the truth that no longer rests still and unsaid beneath the surface. She pictures Vivienne, ardently waiting in the Chantry, refusing to ask for what should be given and given freely. The failing is magnificent in its scope. She closes her eyes.

“I can climb a mountain in a day,” she tells her. “Any Seeker worth their salt can do it. But to weather a storm—without water, weapons, without protection.” She trails off, clenches her jaw. “I’m trying to say—we climb on clear days.”

The replying silence is stony.

“Vivienne,” Cassandra says, “you are the reason we’re alive.”

It never feels like _pride goeth before the fall._ Nothing is conceded, only uncovered. Vivienne goes still underneath her arm. Cassandra doesn’t mean to clutch at her, fumbling and coarse, but the instinct overtakes her, as though she can find ease and warmth for them by force of sheer will.

“If the only way the Inquisition manages to serve you,” she says, “is on my back, I will carry you across the Frostbacks, and it still will not be enough.”

~~~

They sleep, eventually. Cassandra wakes with her nose pressed against Vivienne’s neck, their hands wound together. Her shoulder tilts back under Cassandra’s arm, as though trying to tuck herself more firmly into Cassandra’s warmth. She pulls back her head and waits, perfectly still, for Vivienne to stir.

Intimate enough to feel like a crossed line, but Cassandra won’t wake her.

They rise before the sun. Cassandra finds her armor, fills her hands with water from Vivienne’s hands. They don’t speak. It’s not unpleasant—more the quiet shuffle of two people who are good for nothing in the morning attempting otherwise. (Cassandra has spent her whole life trying to right this habit. Vivienne scrubs furiously at her eyes when Cassandra is turned to the cave wall, belting her armor to her body. She wonders if anyone else has ever discovered this.)

They venture out, tromping through the morning snow. They go east. Cassandra walks at Vivienne’s pace. She keeps an eye out for small game, even though neither of them have knives. Her head aches dully with hunger, but she can go for a while yet. The quiet is oddly calm. Vivienne either would like to forget the night before or has nothing to say about it.

She stops Cassandra once, reaching to squeeze her fingers around her arm. Below them, a felled tree sticks up out of the snowy ground, chopped by axes. The first sign they’ve had since starting off two days before. Cassandra sucks in a breath, and does not dare hope.

They set off again, arm and arm. Vivienne does not let go. Cassandra occasionally pulls her out of a deep pocket of snow.

“You must teach me,” Vivienne says, slightly breathless after one of these incidents, “how you climb an entire mountain in a day.”

Cassandra snorts. “You have better things to do.”

“When I notice a gap in my education,” she replies, “I strive to rectify it.”

“It’s not difficult.” Cassandra notices a glimmer on the horizon, and squints. “Just pick a small mountain.”

Vivienne makes a disagreeable noise, and then twin fangs emerge from the snow.

The creature is some kind of mountain elemental, an arachnid made of stone and ice, lying in wait under the snow for prey. The eyes glimmer as shattered geodes do. It has six sets of perfectly blue-white fangs, ten bowed legs, and a tail that swipes Cassandra into the cliff face.

They have no hope against it. It clicks its long fangs together. Vivienne’s hands burn with flame, and the acrid smell of lightning already permeates the air.

There is a space between the legs. A long fall, but not impossible. It rears back to strike.

Cassandra gets out of the way of her own body. The choice is so easy it’s merely instinct. This time—this time, she will be fast enough.

~~~

Battling colors. Shapes clattering against each other. Soundless music. A dull pain spouting from her side.

She opens her eyes to grey vision, and Vivienne’s fingers press inside her body. She must be attempting to stop the bleeding. The pain is so intense it lances through her chest and up her jaw. The snow is set. Vivienne’s gloves are red to the elbow.

“You lost your hennin,” Cassandra slurs, and Vivienne shushes her with a hard glare.

“You threw me off a mountain ledge.” But Vivienne does not sound upset. “Stop talking.”

“Fang or foot?” No answer. “Fang or—“

“Fangs. Both, in your side. Be _silent._ ” Her voice curls in on itself in her tightness, and Cassandra closes her eyes.

“Are you hurt?” she mutters.

Vivienne stiffens, but does not stop. “Save your strength,” she says.

“Are you hurt?” Cassandra will repeat the question until she gets an answer.

“I am well.” The fingers prod all the way through her body. The pain is meaningless. “I am untouched by the elemental, due to your idiocy.”

It takes long—too long to lurch Cassandra to her feet. Vivienne is under her arm instantly, supporting her. Darkness is setting in.

“We have to stop.” Cassandra’s head spins. “Venture on again tomorrow. We can’t go on like this.”

“Lean on me.” Vivienne goes forward, pulling her along, and Cassandra almost stumbles into a snowdrift. Vivienne nearly goes to her knees trying to catch her.

“You can’t carry me through the snow,” Cassandra pants. Vivienne’s arm is tight around her back.

“If I don’t,” she answers, with a serene calm that Cassandra both expects and is astonished by, “we will both die.”

Pain spirals up her side, lodges her in chest. The impaling was not clean. The fangs were serrated, Cassandra realized, when they punched through her chestplate.

“Now,” Vivienne says, taking one careful step forward, “move your feet.”

~~~

The sun sets, and the cold creeps in. The wind whips at their cheeks. She is just close enough she can spot the raw patch is being worn on Vivienne’s cheek—a dark blister near invisible upon her skin.

Cassandra slides knee deep into the snow and falls forward. Her arms are too cold to catch herself. The thump makes a stitch unwind in her side, a trickle of warmth that must be blood seeping out of the wound. Too deep to close.

She cannot get up. Vivienne is instantly on her knees in the snow with her, wrapping Cassandra’s arms around her neck.

“We must do it together,” she instructs. “On three. One, two—“

“You must leave me,” says Cassandra. There is no time for hesitations, but even Vivienne must falter from time to time. She loses her footing on the rise under Cassandra’s weight and slides back to her knees.

“You must leave me,” she says again. It is getting harder to talk. “Get help. Come back. I have survived worse.”

“I will not be able to find you again,” is Vivienne’s reply. She turns out to look at the cliffs. The white, wide expanse. And then she jumps—starts, like she’s seen a ghost.

Cassandra leans forward, as though she will be able to find the strength to stand and fight. But Vivienne shakes her head, rearranges her arms around her neck. “It’s nothing,” she says. “On three.”

“What did you see?” Cassandra asks.

She shakes her head vigorously. “Never mind.”

“Vivienne.” Cassandra’s head lolls.

“A woman.” A pause. “Standing in the snow.”

There is no time for the resulting silence. “The cold is getting to you,” she wheezes. “There is no reason for both of us to suffer here. _Go._ ”

“No,” says Vivienne, and the world stutters to a halt. Lips, now coarsened by the bitter cold, press against the corner of her mouth. The slightest warmth of breath. Once, as a brush of touch, and then again, with purpose.

Cassandra must be dying.

“I told you,” she says, “I make no habit of abandonment. On three.”

Cassandra’s arms tighten about her neck; she braces her feet in the snow. At the end, they both rise, and even the howling of the wind cannot bend them back again.

~~~

“Cassandra. There is a light.” Vivienne’s voice is steady despite her pants of exhaustion. Each step takes several breaths.

“Liar.” Her voice is a croak. Her vision dims into bleakest grey, unable to see her own hand in front of her face, and she begins to double over into the snow. Vivienne roots her feet in the snow, adjusts her arm. They begin a new slog up a slope.

“What a child you become at discomfort.” Had she the breath, Cassandra would laugh.

Instead she mutters, “I must—make amends for what I said.”

“Put your breath to better use.” Vivienne gives a hard pull when her feet slow. The crown of the hill seems a mile away. Trickles of blood freeze in the snow. “I can put my entire hand through you. Twice.”

“But—“

“Another attempt at atonement will surely kill you.” Her voice is softer now, and not with the hoarseness of the cold. “And if that doesn’t, then I will.”

Then she halts, too suddenly for Cassandra to catch herself. She wobbles—Vivienne’s arms wrap around her chest, and her head falls forward, her face pressed against Vivienne’s neck. _How are you standing?_ she wonders blearily, drunk on blood loss. The answer is simple: because she must.

“Do you hear it?” Vivienne whispers. Her skin is so cold. She can feel the steady beat of Vivienne’s pulse against her cheek.

A song on the wind. Murmur-soft, clinging to the notes just above the mountain’s howl.

“Voices,” she says, and despite her attempt to hide it, the relief cracks her voice in half.

There is only one thing to be said. “Your Inquisition,” whispers Cassandra, the words imprinting against Vivienne’s skin. Her intake of breath—surprise, succor, or another ballast against the wind—is warm as firelight, bright as sun.


End file.
